[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.]

We have posted up the default user-interface widget for Dojo Offline; this is all coded up now in JavaScript and is complete. This means all the default user-interface code, which lives in dojo.dot.ui, is done. The UI is ‘driven’ by the rest of the Dojo Offline framework, which includes dojo.dot and dojo.sync. Note that there is no real code inside of dojo.dot and dojo.sync; these are just stubs for now and return suitable ‘fake’ data to drive the UI. The next step is to actually code the inside of dojo.dot and dojo.sync, which actually persist data and do syncing.

I have updated Moxie, a demo offline web based word processor, to use the new Dojo Offline UI. Check it out. I have confirmed that the UI widget works in Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, cross-platform. Play around with the widget and tell me if you find any glitches. Please note that the Dojo Offline Widget’s UI doesn’t currently actually do any persisting or synchronizing; it is ‘dumb’ and is just driven by the rest of Dojo Offline (dojo.dot and dojo.sync, which isn’t currently implemented.

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Overview

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead.

Last Week

After a bunch of thought to ensure an easy-to-use and powerful API, we blogged what the Dojo Offline API will look like. See the blog post. Thanks to everyone who helped.

Last week we also began coding the JavaScript API for Dojo Offline. One nice highlight is that folks will be able to begin playing around with Dojo Offline even before the offline proxy is ready.

This Week

The default Dojo Offline, as seen in the DOT mockups from a few weeks ago, is almost done; this UI is driven off of the Dojo Offline framework, and is easily customizable. Expect to see it done today or tomorrow, with a demos that allow you to play around with the UI portion of Dojo Offline.

Once the UI portion is done, the next step is to fill out the framework itself, starting with the dojo.dot.file portion of the API.

Several people have inquired as to what SitePen’s motivation is for working on the Dojo Offline Toolkit and in such an open manner. Besides the typical business and social benefits of contributing to open source projects, we have a few other reasons worthy of discussion.

A difficult, if not impossible, problem to solve in isolation

We have already received tremendously valuable feedback from the community, affording us the opportunity to consider and incorporate many possibilities and ideas that we would not have come up with on our own. While this is true of most open source efforts, it is essential for this project in particular, given the large number of factors that must coalesce to ensure the success of the Dojo Offline Toolkit.

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[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.]

The last few weeks we’ve been putting together our API for the Dojo Offline Toolkit (DOT). How will a programmer use this toolkit in their work? How will it be integrated into their applications?

Last week we reported on addressing usability for offline access, with offline mockups of popular web apps. Usability is just as important for programmers as it is for end-users, it just takes a different form: the API, or Application Programmer Interface. Getting the API right is just as important as the UI; programmers need the love too.

Look Mah, No Proxy!

Before we dive down into the API, I want to share a nice surprise: the Dojo Offline Toolkit API has been designed to not necessarily need a web proxy. For example, if your browser has native support for offline access, then we don’t need to download the small web proxy — the browser will simply cache these offline resources. The plan for Firefox 3 is to natively support such an API — in this scenario, Dojo Offline could simply use the browser’s offline cache rather than requiring you to download the web proxy.

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Overview

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead.

Last Week

The big task last week was finishing the Dojo Offline API. Lots of great people gave lots of great feedback, and the design for how programmers will work with DOT is done; expect a blog post today or tommorrow with details.

This Week

The first task this week is to document the API we have come up with. Next, its time to start coding. The first task will be to implement the API in JavaScript. A nice side-effect is the API will actually work without having us to finish the local proxy immediately, since it can just cache it’s UI files using standard HTTP/1.1 caching inside the browser cache. This means folks can get started prototyping apps quickly; the downside is that your UI files might get blown from the browser cache, which is what the small, downloadable web proxy is meant to solve.

This post marks the one week anniversary of the inception of the Dojo cheer squad. Though the facts are still unverified, this may well be the first ever all-male cheer squad in the history of the world. Perhaps even the universe. If not, it is the first ever all-male cheer squad in the history of the Dojo Toolkit. Go Dojo!

Just to let folks know, we are posting weekly status updates for the Dojo Offline Toolkit over on the SitePen Labs blog every Monday. Make sure to check it out each week to see how our progress is going! View the blog here, or grab it’s RSS feed here for your RSS reader to subscribe to updates.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve integrated Dojo’s Charting and Filtering Table widgets with Lightstreamer’s Comet server. A demo is available, as is the example source code to try it out yourself.

From the Dojo Toolkit perspective, we aim to make Dojo work efficiently with any commercial or open source Comet server instance, and partnering with Lightstreamer to make this happen was outstanding.

And from the SitePen perspective, we’re highly motivated to build web applications for our clients with real-time capabilities. This proof of concept shows how live charting could be used in your application to plot any dynamic data source without having to rely on a plug-in solution!

Overview

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead.

Last Week

The big task last week was finishing mockups of what potential offline-enabled web applications might look like. The goals here are to make sure we are building the right technology to support offline-needs and to find a common UI that can be turned into a template usable by developers. We created three offline mockups: Gmail, Blogger, and a corporate portal named Adenine. You can see a full blog post on the SitePen blog with these mockups here: http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2007/01/09/28/

Once the mockup was finished mid week, we moved on to defining what Dojo Offline’s API would look like. A lot of great suggestions came in from folks like Dustin Machi, Brendan Eich, Julien Couvreur, and more. We also talked on the phone with Dave Camp, a Mozilla developer working on offline access in the web browser itself, in order to identify common needs and find similar APIs.

On Friday we gave a presentation at the Dojo Developer Day on the Dojo Offline Toolkit, which was received well. We also had nice several nice writeups in the mainstream computer press, including eWeek ( http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2080295,00.asp ) and InfoWorld ( http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/009606.html )

This Week

The big goal this week is to finish the Dojo Offline API and document it, then start coding.

[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.]

Introduction

The best way to start development on a programming framework is to ground it in the kinds of user interfaces it will be used in. This ensures that you don’t create astronaut architectures that have no real world use.

The first step in creating the Dojo Offline Toolkit is to therefore figure out what offline web applications might look like. This will help us determine what to include in the Dojo Offline API and what to leave out, and will also be bundled as a simple HTML/CSS template that developers can easily drop into their applications.

SitePen kicked this off by creating offline-enabled mockups of three popular and useful web applications: Gmail, Blogger, and a corporate portal named Adenine. For all three the goal is to find a consistent, simple user-interface for offline web applications.

Gmail	Blogger

Corporate Portal

Gmail

We start with a mockup of an offline-enabled Gmail (click on any of the images to view them full-size):

The first thing to notice is the addition of a new widget on the left-hand side of the page, the Offline Info widget. This widget encapsulates all of our offline functionality for Gmail.

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